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THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 14, 2013
and benefits, the total amount based on
seniority.
The Cravath system assumed that all
the partners worked together and contrib-
uted collectively to the firm's success. No
one had to be a "rainmaker," or client-get-
ter. The idea was distasteful. The way to
attract and keep clients was not by selling,
marketing, or promoting oneself but by
doing solid work. It was all but unheard-
of for big corporations to pit one firm
against another, or to comparison-shop
for lower fees.
LeBoeuf, founded in 1929, allocated
compensation based on individual perfor-
mance. The dominant partner, Randall
LeBoeuf, Jr., provided the financial un-
derpinnings. Around the firm, he was said
to be the highest-paid lawyer on Wall
Street. He died in 1975.
Davis, after becoming a partner, in
1986, did mergers and acquisitions and
gradually assumed a greater management
role. In 1999, he and another partner were
named co-chairmen.
By the competitive standards of major
law firms, LeBoeuf was a pleasant place to
work, but, in terms of profits per partner,
it ranked among the lowest of the major
firms headquartered in New York. To
bring about change, Davis had to push
out less productive partners, close low-
margin regional offices, and reduce ex-
penses. To execute these often unpleasant
tasks, he turned to Stephen DiCarmine.
While Davis had a pale complexion,
DiCarmine, who is fifty-six, was tan year-
round. He dressed in designer suits and
drove a Porsche convertible. He was known
as the colorful counterpart to the firm's
many staid lawyers. Growing up in Yon-
kers, he had never imagined a career in
such a respected profession. His father
had been a U.P.S. driver. After his moth-
er's sister was divorced, she and her son
Vincent Basciano, known to everyone in
DiCarmine's family as Cousin Vinny,
moved in with his family. Vinny was three
years younger than Stephen, and they
were as close as brothers.
With the encouragement of a local
priest, DiCarmine attended college, first
at Manhattan College and then at New
York University. After graduation, he en-
rolled in California Western School of
Law, mostly so that he could go to the
beach. To his surprise, he excelled there.
But his California Western degree didn't
get him far in New York, until a head-
hunter for a law firm called, looking for a
"managing attorney," a job that turned out
to be administering the work of the firm
rather than practicing law. In 1998, he
made his way to LeBoeuf, which needed
someone to help manage its expansion
and market the firm.
Cousin Vinny, meanwhile, worked in
construction, built condos, and went to
Hollywood and then Las Vegas. DiCar-
mine's aunt died in 1993, and at her fu-
neral, in the Bronx, DiCarmine noticed
men who seemed to be bodyguards exam-
ining the flowers. In the receiving line,
men in dark suits bowed and kissed his
cousin's hand. During a Christmas Eve
dinner at Vinny's house, a van filled with
F.B.I. agents arrived and parked outside.
Vinny bantered with them and invited
them in for meatballs. (They declined.)
DiCarmine was slow to acknowledge
what was obvious to everyone else in the
family. His cousin had emerged as the
acting head of the Bonanno crime fam-
ily---Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basci-
ano. The family considered DiCarmine
the young Michael Corleone from "The
Godfather"---the son who wanted noth-
ing to do with the Mafia.
No one at Dewey & LeBoeuf knew
anything about DiCarmine's rela-
tives. (At a previous job, when members
of his cousin's crime family showed up,
looking like characters from central cast-
ing, and wanted him to notarize a docu-
ment, he insisted that they meet him in
the lobby.) DiCarmine didn't know much
about the family or personal lives of the
LeBoeuf partners, either, not even Da-
vis's, other than the fact that he was mar-
ried and had three children. Within a year
of DiCarmine's arrival at the firm, he
noticed that Davis wasn't around much.
When he asked a colleague about it, he
was told that Davis was having some "per-
sonal problems."
After becoming co-chairman of the
firm, Davis divorced his wife and told a
few of his partners and some of his clients
that he was gay. He figured that his career
would be over. Much to his surprise, there
was little apparent reaction.
In time, Davis learned that DiCar-
mine, too, was gay, but the subject was
generally left unmentioned between
them. When Davis asked DiCarmine's
advice about whether he should bring the
man he was involved with to the firm's
seventy-fifth-anniversary celebration, at
Le Cirque, DiCarmine advised him not
to. But Davis did anyway, and he invited
his ex-wife, too. No one seemed to take
it amiss.
In the summer of 2003, Davis's co-
chairman announced his resignation,
leaving Davis in charge. Davis wasn't
a dictatorial partner, in the Randall Le-
Boeuf mold, but he was ambitious. Run-
ning the firm became nearly a full-time
job, which meant that he had few direct
client relationships of his own. He oper-
ated by consensus, shuttling among part-
ners and offices, and through the firm's
executive committee, relying on DiCar-
mine to carry out decisions. LeBoeuf had
long prided itself on the fact that the part-
nership had never taken a vote on any-
thing. As Davis put it, a vote meant that
someone had to lose.
With the power delegated to them by
the firm's executive committee, the two
Steves slashed costs by more than thirty
million dollars annually and boosted
profits per partner from six hundred and
forty thousand, in 1999, to $1.2 million
five years later. But Davis began to think,
and DiCarmine agreed, that LeBoeuf
was an awkward size, caught between the
global giants that were able to serve large
corporate clients, with offices all over the
world, and firms that had chosen to re-
main smaller and focus on very profitable
types of work. Davis didn't see LeBoeuf
as a boutique firm; it didn't have the pres-
tige or the high-margin specialties that
such firms had. But he wanted to build
something lasting and significant, and so
he had to grow.
There were only two ways for a firm
like LeBoeuf to expand: merge with an-
other firm or raid other firms for "lateral"
partners, who would bring major clients
with them. Davis looked at merger candi-
dates, but he was wary: many law-firm
mergers had failed. No candidate seemed
quite right. Then he heard from Stephen
Best, a LeBoeuf partner in the Washing-
ton office, that his friend Ralph Ferrara, a
star securities litigator, might be willing to
consider a move. Ferrara had started a
Washington office of Debevoise & Plimp-
ton, one of the smaller New York firms in
the Cravath mold.
Davis visited Ferrara in Washington,
and learned that the Debevoise pension
plan was unfunded. If the firm ran into
trouble, it might not be able to meet its